The Whale Song Translation: A Voyage of Discovery To Neptune and Beyond (17 page)

“Calling in the big guns, boss?”

“We need a pattern recognition expert, and Dr. Bono is, after all, the mastermind of the geometry of eleven-dimensional hyperspace.”

“Oh, yeah,” replied Andrew. “Dr. Bono’s recent article in
Science
. . . his new slant on the mathematics underlying string theory.”

“Exactly,” said Dmitri. “I’d like a quick resolution to this project, so please don’t take it personally. You two are more than welcome to participate. While we’re waiting, let’s examine some of the other plots.”

Three minutes later, Greg burst through the lab’s swinging double-doors. He wore a blue and gold L.A. Lakers Championship cap.

“Professor Bono, I presume,” said Andrew, his tone respectful despite the joking words. “Did the Lakers win last night?”

Greg mimed a jump shot. “Yep, a Kobe buzzer-beater from beyond the arc. Swish!”

While Greg examined the circular patterns, he received a ten-minute briefing. “I agree with you,” he finally said. “This could
be a significant development. You can count me in, but I’ll need a Speakeasy tutorial.”

“Absolutely.” Dmitri and Greg sealed the agreement with a fist bump. “Since Seema and Andrew need to catch up on their sleep, let’s all meet here tomorrow at 9 a.m. I’ll rearrange my schedule to work with you.”

E
NGINEERING
K
ARMA

SoCalSci University, Los Angeles, California—late afternoon

It was nearly 5 p.m. and Dmitri was back in the office after teaching his afternoon class. “Fred, I’ve attached the PowerPoint files for both lectures to the email. Thanks so much.” With the cursor on the email
SEND
button, he clicked his mouse, pleased that a department colleague had agreed to substitute teach both of his undergraduate courses on short notice. He had bought two days of freedom to assist Greg in the analysis of the recordings.

Grabbing a pencil, Dmitri beat the rhythm of a favorite jazz riff against a coffee mug, swiveling and rocking in his chair. The thought of Seema’s and Andrew’s startling Speakeasy observation triggered a familiar tingling sensation in his chest. Even Greg, an inveterate skeptic, had been intrigued by the cryptic bull’s-eye pattern. Was this the proverbial smoking gun of a breakthrough discovery or another false lead in the labyrinthine pursuit of the scientific method? He couldn’t think of anyone more qualified than Greg to help him deduce the significance of the geometric figures in the whale song.

Dmitri closed his eyes and reflected back to the childhood memory of lazy summer mornings when he could sleep in undisturbed by an alarm clock. He remembered pulling the sheets over his head to create a private sanctuary and listening, spellbound, as the neighbor’s parrot alternately squawked and enunciated perfect Spanish phrases from a backyard cage. At the time, he wondered how a bird could speak a foreign language better than anyone in his fourth-grade Spanish class. This linguistic revelation had been indelibly etched into his young mind, launching a lifelong fascination with sound and language.

During his father’s final year, Dmitri had grown quite fond of a pair of blue and yellow talking parakeets at the local pet store. A few months after Michael Dmitri’s death and with the onset of her son’s spells of loneliness, Dmitri’s mother purchased the birds as a tenth-birthday present. Just as she had hoped, his devotion to the loquacious budgies had sparked her boy’s emergence from his doldrums.

Inspired by the neighbor’s parrot, Dmitri had a brainstorm about showcasing his birds’ vocal talents as a school science fair project. After a year of training, the budgies had finally learned to speak the same two phrases in three different languages—English, Spanish, and French. During the fair’s public session, his avian subjects’ multi-lingual pronouncements and the title on his poster board,
BIRD BRAIN TRANSLATORS
, had delighted the attendees.

Dmitri’s parakeets often brushed their beaks together in the fashion of kissing. When performed to the squeaky-pitched accompaniment of “
Je t’aime, cheri
,” the love dance had proved irresistible to his prettiest and most popular sixth-grade classmate, Joanna Barnes. Since the precocious Joanna had never previously sought his attention, Dmitri willingly acquiesced to her request for an encore performance.

On the following afternoon, Dmitri had felt the tickling of “butterflies” in his stomach as he’d escorted the unusually chatty Joanna to his modest ranch home. With his parents at work and his brother still in school, Dmitri, the son of an ice cream man, served up hot fudge sundaes. In the ensuing sugar rush of a second helping, he’d meekly surrendered to Joanna’s maternal play instincts while she’d force-fed him globs of goo and giggled unabashedly as they dribbled down his chin.

Hearing the sounds of budgies nearby, Joanna had announced she was ready for the show. Dmitri toweled his face, led her into the living room, and prepped his pets for their language lesson. As soon as the birds had commenced their French-kissing ritual, Joanna cooed a melodious refrain of “
Je t’aime, cheri
,
Je t’aime, cheri
” and danced around him in an ever-tightening circle. Inching closer and closer, Dmitri would forever remember the moment their noses touched, the sensory rush of Joanna’s rosebud scent mingled with her warm cocoa breath, and her elfin grin as she poked his cheek and whispered, “You missed a spot.” When Joanna licked the creamy residue from his cheek, his entire body quivered like Jell-O. In ultra-slow motion, her lips had glided across his face and down to his mouth, leaving a moist trail and a pleasurable tickling sensation in their wake. When her tongue grazed his lips, Dmitri had experienced a shocking revelation: language wasn’t the only adaptation of the mouth’s primary taste-sensing organ.

As it turned out, it was the first and last time Joanna would grace him with tactile affection, with the single exception, years later, of a polite handshake as his high school’s homecoming queen. However, he had learned an important lesson on that long-lost afternoon. Science was more than just interesting. Science was way cool, yielding discoveries as unlikely as his first romantic encounter and the enduring, up-close vision of Joanna’s dazzling smile.

Pleased that his feathered friends had performed so admirably, Dmitri had devised an even more ambitious project for the following year’s fair. In an attempt to assess their mental abilities and rekindle Joanna’s favor, he had taught them phrases for simple addition such as “one plus one is two,” “one plus two is three,” and “two plus two is four.” Once they had mastered those sentences, he’d tested their responses to partial phrases such as “one plus one is” or just “two.” For hours and days on end, he’d prompted them with these test questions but, to his disappointment, their replies were limited to mere mimicry.

Joanna’s stinging rebuke on the night of the fair compounded his frustration. “It’s fiendish,” she had snarled. “You’ve turned your love birds into math geeks.” After she’d stalked away, Dmitri had nearly cried, feeling like a failure.

Advised the next day of a grade of A+ and a special award for his endeavor, a perplexed Dmitri had queried his science teacher. Mr. Garcia’s reply resonated throughout Dmitri’s lifetime.
“It’s the nature of the scientific method. An experiment’s success doesn’t only depend on proving its hypothesis. What’s most important is that the results should lead to an improved hypothesis. The questions you pose are just as important as the answers you seek.”

His teacher’s advice, however, had only partially helped to disentangle his jumbled feelings about the project and Joanna’s reaction. Why was life so complicated, so unfair? In less than two years, he’d lost both his father and Joanna. The memory of his parakeets had always evoked strong emotions about life’s bewildering stew of intertwined dualities: discovery and loss, success and failure, love and hate. He’d eventually learned to minimize the confusion, to build a firewall around his feelings, by immersing himself in schoolwork, hobbies, and sports.

With the passing years and the accumulation of more science awards, it was not surprising that, as a college freshman, Dmitri would pursue a joint engineering major in acoustics and signal processing. If he were more of a true believer than a seasoned skeptic, he would have sworn that the intersection of his world line with McPinsky’s was preordained. After enrolling in SoCalSci’s Graduate School of Engineering, his new mentor had not only rekindled his childhood fascination, he had inspired its transformation into near reverence for the mathematical and scientific foundations of speech and language.

There was no better example of this than in Dmitri’s field of specialty, digital speech engineering. Digital signal engineers had developed mathematical formulas which, when coded into a mobile phone’s microprocessor chips, transform the speaker’s voice into a compressed string of binary digits—ones and zeros. These compression techniques enable the bandwidth-limited cell phone infrastructure to support increased levels of traffic for a fixed cost. Once this information flows through the network, the inverse set of transforms at the receiving phone reconstructs a facsimile of the speaker’s voice. The quality of the resynthesized voice, he had learned, is amazingly good enough to convince most mobile phone users of the speaker’s authenticity.

Dmitri had been blown away by his first glimpse of the international voice coding standard, called a “speech codec,” used in the early cell phones. As thick as a small phone book, it contained pages of complicated equations, codebooks, and sophisticated detectors of periodicity and randomness, all to determine the shape of the speaker’s vocal tract, the vibrations of their vocal chords, and most importantly, to capture the essence of personality in the medium of sound.

Nothing, he had thought, could be more compelling than to reduce the pitch and timbre of spoken words to their primitive mathematical elements as dictated by signal theory, to reconstruct them according to the same rules, and to hear the results: the immediacy and poignancy of a human voice. Thanks to his mentor’s inspiration, the realization that speech, the acoustic vessel that conveys our thoughts, emotions, and identities, could figuratively be dissected into little pieces and then reconstituted into the reanimation of the original utterance was a moment of satori.

Dmitri had experienced this revelation first hand, many years ago, during a college summer internship. He’d been hired by a Fortune 500 cell phone manufacturer to test the voice quality of their product subject to a variety of challenging situations, such as noisy acoustic and electronic environments, networks saturated by high volumes of traffic, and even for speakers with pronounced accents. Remembering the emotional impact of hearing his father’s voice when watching old videos, he’d fed a precious family recording into a computer simulation of the company’s speech codec prototype. He wasn’t at all surprised that the program’s resynthesized version, a mathematical abstraction of his father lovingly calling out to his mother, “Sylvia, honey,” still held the power to move him to tears.

With the passage of years, McPinsky’s challenge had set Dmitri upon a path which ultimately led to PICES, Chris Gorman, and Melanie. His life had done a full circle, and all the significant threads had comingled. His world now encompassed a convergent mix of sounds—the sounds of language, the sounds of songs, and tragically the sounds that kill. Thinking about tomorrow’s hope for a breakthrough, the familiar tingling sensation returned.

E
UREKA,
E
UREKA

SoCalSci University, Los Angeles, California—two days later

“Give it up, pal. Get some rest.” Dmitri’s voice was hoarse with fatigue, his tone apologetic. “Your face looks like a slept-in suit.”

“Your eyes look like Bloody Mary’s.” Greg stroked his face, measuring the lengthening stubble for the twentieth time. “It’s just no use. We’ve scoured every second of the data in all three of the recordings. Just the random circular loops and that single bull’s-eye in the Maui data. There’s nothing at all in the other two recordings, just burbles and bleeps. No interesting shapes or patterns.”

“And I was hoping for more instances of inflection points where the symbols might be likely. The humpbacks guard their secrets well.” Dmitri’s pale face wore an amused grin. “Never say die. I’ll ask Gorman for more data.”

Greg’s lips sputtered like a motorboat. “Just label me a skeptic.”

It was late afternoon, and Greg and Dmitri had toiled for two sixteen-hour days in SoCalSci’s Signal Processing Lab investigating the whale song data. With no breakthrough in sight, Seema and Andrew had resumed their own research projects. Dmitri had occasionally excused himself to attend office hours and meetings while Greg, who had no other commitments, spent the entire time in the lab. They’d experienced fleeting moments of inspiration, only to be disappointed as the mirage of discovery evaporated into the recesses of the LCD monitor.

Greg counted the empty cans of Red Bull strewn across the desk. “I’m done. I need a shower and a quickie nap. Got a big date with Michelle tonight.”